Your browser does not appear to support JavaScript, or JavaScript is currently disabled. This page uses JavaScript for certain types of content, so we strongly recommend that you enable JavaScript for browsing this site.

Incommensurable Ontologies and the Return of the Witness in Neil Gaiman's 1602

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11th 2001 attacks,
many literary and cultural critics pronounced postmodernism,[1] as
both an artistic and an intellectual movement, to be fitfully and
finally dead. With the casualties from the attack mounting (and threatening
to climb all the higher in response to the pronounced anxiety and
rage that quickly swept throughout both the Western and Eastern worlds),
and the crowning symbols of Western capitalism and empire destroyed
by what might best be described as the most fundamental of fundamentalists,
the great age of irony and play in Western art and thought seemed,
to many, to have reached its ultimate, horrible conclusion.

Representing the popular conservative, right-wing critical consensus
of the time, Richard Wolin argued that "amid the confusion and uncertainty
of 9/11’s aftermath, one fact that stands out is the Left’s total
disarray and disorientation" (40), with the Left (who Wolin identifies
as being virtually indistinguishable from postmodernists) widely
seen by a variety of anti-postmodernist reactionists as having "written
off 'history' and 'the event' as anachronistic" and "its proponents
[as]… clearly … at a loss as to how to respond" to
the attacks and the sudden, drastic shifts Western and Eastern culture
were about to undergo and perhaps, moreover, as having lost any adherence
to "the imperative of morality" (Wolin 46).

As Terry Eagleton noted with some remaining measure of postmodernesque
irony and jest, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, postmodernism,
with its penchant for theorization and flagrant questioning of supposed
norms and fundamentals, was now viewed as "the prerogative of soft-spoken,
long-haired intellectuals, most of who are no doubt it cahoots with
al-Qaida" (8). With the age of postmodernism seemingly at an end,
many, like Wolin, called for a return to supposed "fundamentals" and "morals" (notions
which both postmodernism and Poststuctrualism had effectively called
the logic of into question over the past forty years of Western thought)
and to full-hearted allegiance to the American empire, without question
or doubt, in order to preserve the suddenly threatened Western (and
more particularly American) way of life.

It was under these unique cultural and historical circumstances
that Neil Gaiman began to compose the work that would ultimately
become 1602. In his Afterword to the 1602 hardcover
edition, Gaiman discuses the origin of the project and asserts that "September
the 11th happened, and while I wasn’t certain what I wanted in [the
project that would become 1602], I suddenly knew what
I didn’t want. No planes. No skyscrapers. No bombs. No guns. I didn’t
want it to be a war story, and I didn’t want to write a story in
which might made right – or in which might made anything" (201).
After spending some time in Venice in the weeks following the September
11th attacks, pondering how the project could and should move forward,
Gaiman states that "the past seemed very close to me … I
came home from the trip knowing exactly what kind of story I wanted
to tell" (201). He claims that he decided to write a story in the
spirit of the Marvel comics of his youth, which were marked by a
particular sense of what he calls "playfulness and of a world borning … something
that would not be pastiche, but which Stan Lee or Jack Kirby would
have recognized" (201).

At the same time as the postmodern age of irony and playfulness
was seemingly beginning to slip away, Gaiman decided to create a
text that would offer, in effect, a story grounded firmly in both
the rich traditions of the Marvel Comics universe and of postmodern
storytelling and thought, particularly in the tendency of postmodern
literature and art to foreground ontological questions concerning
the nature of being and textuality in order to perform what Annie
Dillard refers to as "unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup" (11). With
postmodern fiction’s penchant for textual play, the celebration and
ready manipulation of authorial power, wide divergence of notions
and theories, and outright rejection of pre-imposed artistic and
intellectual norms and standards, seeming to be under the threat
of outright rejection and annihilation in the wake of the various
reactionary intellectual responses to the September 11th attacks,
Gaiman’s 1602 offers a story rooted firmly in the tradition
of postmodern storytelling, yet serves, nevertheless, to offer something
of a revision of the guiding principles of such.

1602, it must be noted, does not call for a mere return
to the traditions of postmodern storytelling, despite Gaiman’s own
implicit claims to the contrary. Instead, Gaiman offers something
of a critique of postmodern fiction’s adamant focus on exploring
and responding to ontological questions, namely questions of world-making
and the nature of being, often at the expense of rejecting or deprivileging
epistemological questions of textual knowledge and meaning.

While Gaiman’s narrative is particularly concerned with exploring
the disorder produced by the intersection of two entirely separate
realities, the temporal and textual disorder in 1602 is
ultimately resolved by the efforts of the figure of the Watcher,
who acts in the text as a witness par excellence, and is able to
right the wrongs of the heterotopia created by the combination of
these incommensurable realities by renouncing (as he so often does)
his vow of ontological non-interference. It is by offering a testimony
to what occurred that the multiverse is saved from ultimate annihilation
and that history, such as it is, is preserved.

The story of 1602, at the outset, appears fairly simple
and not entirely atypical of the plethora of other cross-world and
cross-temporal stories that Marvel Comics (and DC Comics as well)
has presented over the past fifty years. As the story opens, it is
the early 17th century and Elizabethan England is on the verge of
sweeping cultural and political change. Queen Elizabeth is being
plotted against by a variety of parties, including James VI, who
is hotly pursuing her throne and collaborating with the Spanish High
Inquisitor to assassinate her. Furthermore, a variety of bizarre
natural occurrences begin to occur throughout Europe and North America,
such as earthquakes and blood-red skies and the sudden appearance
of elements from other temporalities. The age of the Marvel superheroes
begins quite suddenly, only three hundred and sixty years too early.
Various super beings who are obvious analogues to the popular heroes
and villains of the Marvel universe (circa 1968 or so), both in name
and general appearance, begin, seemingly at once, to arise and integrate
themselves into this new world, in turn interacting with and shifting
the history of "our world" and "our history" at the expense of changing
the principles of their own reality and history.

In effect, 1602 charts the intersection of two contrary
realities, specifically the textual/historical reality of early-modern
England and the fantastic/textual reality of the postmodern Marvel
superhero age. Despite their shared spatial and temporal zone, these
two worlds are presented by Gaiman as being utterly incommensurable
with each other, to the extent that they risk fully negating each
other once they are combined. The "world" or order that results from
the combination of these two fundamentally opposed realities can
be best classified as a heterotopia, the concept of which comes from
Michel Foucault, who, in The Order of Things, argues
that

There is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous,
the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the
disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders
glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of
the heteroclite; … in such a state, things are "laid," "placed," "arranged" in
sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to
find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath
them all. … Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because
they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible
to name this and that, because they destroy “syntax” in advance,
and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also
the less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and
also opposite to one another) to "hold together." (xviii)

Within the confines of the heterotopia of 1602,
fragments of the two incommensurable worlds are superimposed upon
each other without any adherence to the laws or principles of geometry
or, for that matter, of reality. No common locus connects the two
realities and their alignment quickly proves disastrous, with history – both
of Elizabethan England (connected, implicitly, to the history of
our own reality) and of the Marvel multiverse (which is a fictional
reality within our own reality) – being radically restructured
and reconstituted.

In his book Postmodern Fictions, Brian McHale argues
that the dominant mode of postmodernist fiction is primarily ontological
in nature:

That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which
engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls "post-cognitive": "Which
world is this? What is to be done with it? What of my selves is to
do it?" Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the
ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world
it projects, for instance: What is a world?; What kind of worlds
are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What
happens when different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation,
or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode
of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the
world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured?
And so on. (10)

McHale insists that postmodern literary texts show
a marked tendency to focus on matters of world building and questions
of existence. A variety of narrative devices are employed in postmodern
literary texts in order to solve whatever questions or mysteries
they might raise, including the highlighting of the role of the author
in the creation of the world(s) at hand; the portrayal of what Umberto
Eco aptly refers to as "Transworld Identity" (in which characters
from projected worlds interact with personalities from the real word);
and the outright projection of alternate, imaginary worlds with little
to no connection with the world we know. The postmodern author, according
to McHale, often acts as something of an ostensible god within the
literary texts (greatly radicalizing Sir Philip Sidney’s notion of
the poet being capable of "making things either better than nature
bringeth forth or … forms such as never were in nature" [Sidney
8]), and often presents him or herself as being the ultimate, singular
master of the text, capable of manipulating and acting within it
at will across various ontological planes and of twisting the game,
such as it is, to his or her own ends without the least adherence
to any traditionally pre-set principles or rules.

On the other hand, McHale identifies the dominant mode of modernist
fiction as being primarily epistemological in nature:

Modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and
foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick Higgins. "How
can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in
it?" Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there
to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree
of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another,
and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge
change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of
the knowable? And so on. (9)

In Modernist literary texts, then, mysteries and
questions within the narrative are often solved by engaging in particular
epistemological processes: weighing evidence and engaging in investigation
and consideration, and tending to refuse to engage in imaginary projection
in order to solve the problems or questions at hand in the text.

The crowning narrative figure of modern literature would then be,
as McHale suggests, the detective, who, in the course of his or her
narrative, investigates, gathers evidence, and constructs a logical,
reasonable solution to the questions or disorders s/he is faced with
with. I would like to suggest that the figure of the witness (that
is, the witnessing subject) is perhaps the even more representative
figure of the epistemological dominant in fictional narratives. Shoshana
Felman argues that the figure of the witness, who she identifies
as "a crucial mode of our relation to events of our time," testifies
to "the bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by
occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance,
acts that cannot be … assimilated into full cognition, events
in excess of our frame of reference" (5). The figure of the witness,
unlike that of the detective who is usually able to offer definitive
conclusions and readings of the events that have transpired within
a text, "does not offer … a complete statement, a totalized
account of these events … testimony … addresses
what in history is action that exceeds any substantial significance" (5).

The narrative worlds of fantastic fictions (such as science fiction
stories or superhero comic books) often function, as McHale argues,
as “subversive critiques of worlds and world building, anti-worlds
rather than worlds proper” (33). Robert Scholes suggests that the "fabulous
… is fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically
discontinuous from the one we know … speculative fiction
is defined by the presence of at least one clear represented discontinuity
with life as we know it" (61-62). Fantastic fiction, in some highly
pertinent manner, is always marked by a sharp separation from the
reality we know by the presence of some scientific, technological,
social or cultural element relatively foreign to our own reality
which demands the exploration of the ontological basis of both the
reality of the text and the reality of the reader’s reality. Umberto
Eco notes that

The proper effect of such narrative constructions …
is just that of producing a sense of logical uneasiness and of narrative
discomfort. So they arouse a sense of suspicion in respect to our
common beliefs and affect our disposition to trust the most credited
laws of the world of our encyclopedia. They undermine the world of
our encyclopedia rather than build up another self-sustaining world.
(234)

Fantastic fictions, while often concentrating on
questions of world making, usually give little credence to the figure
of the testifying witness. While a witness might be present in such
texts, his or her primary function is often to serve as a narrative
voice of representation, as a springboard for the reader’s own interpretation
and conception of what is occurring, as the figurative eyes through
which he or she reads. Fantastic fiction, then, serves the primary
purpose not of providing a mimetic representation of reality, but
of forcing us to consider radically different possibilities of being
and existence than our own.

While Gaiman explores a variety of ontological questions and themes
in 1602, he breaks quite succinctly from his postmodern
literary predecessors by refusing to disregard or deprivilege epistemological
questions or concerns and returns, ultimately, to the figure of the
witness not only to provide some explanation of the disorder we and
the characters within the text are confronted with and forced to
attempt to reconcile, but also to preserve such in memory and issue
some form of testimony to such.

The standard postmodern superhero comic is marked by a pronounced
absence of readily apparent authorship. It appears to exemplify Roland
Barthes’s argument that the standard postmodern literary text "is
henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the
author is absent" (145) and, in turn, provides a "multidimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend
… a tissue of quotation drawn from the innumerable centers
of culture" (146). While there are certainly exceptions to this rule
in the wide genre of the postmodern superhero comic, superhero comics
tend, by and large, to render their authors entirely absent. Foucault
questions Barthes’s notion of the death of the author and argues
that the author is, in fact, not an entity at all but rather a function
of both text and culture ("What is an Author?" 144). For Foucault,
the author is not quite dead in the postmodern age, but rather never
truly existed in the manner Sidney and a variety of others understood
him or her to exist in the first place. McHale expands upon Foucault’s
point and argues that in postmodern literary texts, "the author appears
as an institution … as a construct of the reading process,
rather than a textual given; a plural rather than a unitary" (200).
Even when the postmodern author is directly present within a narrative, "s/he
is only merely a function, s/he chooses to behave, if only sporadically,
like a subject, a presence" (McHale 200).

The central narrative figure in 1602 is the familiar
figure of Uatu the Watcher, who serves in the proper Marvel Universe
(and its various manifestations) as something of a cosmic overseer
or witness, monitoring the happenings and temporal activities of
the Marvel Earth and its countless counter-realities, in effect recording
and bearing witness to lost or impossible histories. While the Watcher
appears in 1602 in only two extended but crucial scenes,
his presence looms large throughout the book, serving as our source
for constructing a knowledge of exactly what is occurring within
the text. The Watcher ultimately serves as a witness to what is occurring
within the heterotopia of 1602, as an epistemological
authority that provides some measure of subjective explanation to
what is occurring and gives voice to the disorder at hand. By inserting
the Watcher in such a pronounced role in 1602, Gaiman
revises the often minimalized or absented figure of the witness in
postmodern literature.

In Demuere: Fiction and Testimony, Jacques Derrida
argues that "a witness and a testimony must always be exemplary.
They must first be singular" (40). For Derrida the witness must always
be singular and wholly unique in order to produce a sufficient testimony
to whatever events or traumas he or she has encountered. The witness,
then, is considered not as a plural, but as a singular entity, mutually
a function and a subject of the text. In that respect, the Watcher
is both a witness and a reader par excellence, for, as Derrida insists, "in
essence a testimony … tells, in the first person, the sharable
and unsharable secret of what happened to me, to me alone, the absolute
secret of what I was in a position to live, see, hear, touch, sense
and feel" (43). The witness, as Derrida argues, issues his or her
testimony from a position entirely singular to him or her, and testifies
to what s/he has been in a unique position to witness; the witness
does not stand aside of or above the text, but tends to operate firmly
within its primary ontological level, in turn bearing witness to
the reality at work within the text.

Breaking his resolve never to interfere with the operations and
machinations of a reality and to keep forever silent and indifferent
to what he witnesses, the Watcher reveals the nature of what is occurring
in the heterotopia of 1602 to the 1602 analogue of Dr.
Strange (the leading mystic of the Marvel Universe), stating that
his world, such as it is, is under the threat of immediate extinction
due to a "paratemporal fault line" (118) which he and his fellow
Watchers initially believed would only destroy the heterotopia at
hand. But, as he continues, "we concluded that the destruction of
the universe, while still bounded by the speed of light, would occur
within an expanded simultaneity, which would, paratemporally, have
begun immediately following the initial nanoseconds of the universe.
And then it would expand outward from this universe – we call
it 616 – to engulf the others" (118). According to the Watcher,
this force will destroy the entire multiverse, "or, rather, to put
it even more simply, everything will never have been" (118). The
alignment of these contrary and incommensurable worlds threatens
not only to annihilate the particular heterotopia in which they exist,
but also to enact a series of chaotic events that will tear apart
the entire multiverse.

The Watcher identifies the source of this problem as originating
from a time traveler (who, as we learn later in the story, is in
fact Captain America, sent back in time from a dystopic future world): "A
little more than four hundred years from now, somebody will build
a chronal engine, powered by an unstable simultaneity, which will,
on its translocation to this era, become a microscopic simultaneity.
The Forerunner could be seen as an infection, which the universe
must create antibodies for, which then destroy the host organism" (118).
The alignment of these incommensurable worlds is ultimately a result
of the future colliding with the past, of history being negated.
The Watcher goes on, further, to add that "all other methods of time-traveling
the Watchers have observed until now make use of the various pliable
properties of time. They treat time as a river" (119). This serves
as a radical revisioning of the standard notion of time travel in
popular superhero comics.

The logical question that will strike the reader, of course, is
how the temporal mechanics of the Marvel multiverse have been reversed.
The Watcher explains: "An event roughly four hundred years from now,
on the other hand, will simply punch a hole through time, a little
more than a dozen years ago, and deposit something in our recent
past … it is the arrival of this something which begins
the current cycle of destruction" (119). Due to the time travel of Captain
America (who, Gaiman suggests, embodies the very essence of the Marvel
superhero tradition), the Marvel Age, and, in effect, the postmodern
Age, have begun nearly four hundred years too early as a reaction,
or an antibody, to the temporal violation. The Watcher notes that "the
universe follows certain laws … and … I am a creature
of the universe. Some laws I understand, some I do not." The Watcher’s
limited, finite knowledge is especially noteworthy and decidedly
uncharacteristic of the standard narrative authority we tend to find
in postmodern literary texts. In a standard postmodernistic literary
text, one would expect all of these questions to be fully resolved
(or for a plethora of possible reasons to be offered, as demonstrated
in texts such as Nabokov’s Pale Fire and John Fowles’s The
French Lieutenant’s Woman). We would expect the author to
have pushed the figurative curtain aside and revealed all of the
possible machinations behind the hetertopia at hand. The Watcher
does not posses the sort of near-infinite knowledge that the primary
narrative figures of postmodernist literary texts tend to possess.
Gaiman does not position the Watcher, or himself or any other textual
authority for that matter, as the proverbial master of the universe
being offered; instead, the Watcher is himself established as a resident
of the universe (or multiverse) at hand, and does not exist above,
below or alongside of such. His knowledge is instead finite and dictated
by the indiscernible rules of the reality in which he resides.

By the end of the story, the Marvel heroes in 1602 have gathered
some conception (however limited and subjective) of what is occurring
and, after an extended battle, Captain America is sent, at least
apparently, back into the future and the ontological zone of 1602 is
seemingly annihilated without destroying the entire multiverse in
the process. In the aftermath, the Watcher notes that "time heals,
and is healed. All will come into existence in its proper time. One
small possibility has ended, that everything else may exist" (196).
It is due to his interference, his breaking of the Watchers’ pact
and issuing of his testimony to Dr. Strange, that this particular
world survives. The Watcher asks another Watcher, "if I had not interfered
… they could never have mended it themselves, could they?" to
which a member of the Watcher’s High Tribunal responds, "We will
never know … will we?" (197). As a reward and curse for
his intervention, the Watcher is given the heterotopia of 1602 to
preserve within him, to guard, cherish and continue to watch. The
heterotopia of 1602 is saved by the Watcher’s very refusal
to simply watch and by his insistence of bearing witness and offering
testimony. By bearing witness and offering his forbidden testimony
to Sir Stephen Strange, the Watcher allows for the world to be preserved
from annihilation.

While the Watcher’s maintenance of the 1602 universe
might seem to be something of a deus ex machina to allow
this particular universe to survive (and be returned to in later
stories), it also can reasonably be interpreted as an assertion of
the ultimate power and responsibility of the figure of the witness
to maintain reality and history and order the projected universe,
a reminder of the ultimate importance and necessity of bearing witness
to traumatic events. With 1602, Gaiman does not offer
a radical critique or rejection of the postmodern literary tradition,
but suggests a revision of such, calling for the intervention of
the figure of the witness in the postmodern literary narrative. Gaiman
refuses to abide by the “rules” (such as they are) of postmodern
literary fiction, and reasserts and repositions the figure of the
witness as the preserver of history and, by effect, meaning within
a literary text. Gaiman indeed does not offer a story in which might
makes right, but rather a story in which witnessing and remembering
are what ultimately make right and preserve the intrinsic value of
both the event and, even moreover, history.

Notes

[1] Given the variety (and, moreover,
the contestability) of the various theories and definitions of
postmodernism that have been disseminated and debated
over the last thirty years, a working definition of the term “postmodern,” at
least in terms of this study, would seem to be in order. My conception
of postmodernism is much in line with the definitions
offered by Fredric Jameson (for whom postmodernism is
intrinsically linked to the cultural logic of late capitalism);
Jean Baudrillard (who argued that postmodernism involved
the substitution of the simulacrum for the real); John Barth (who
considered postmodern literature to be a literature of
replenishment); and, perhaps most especially, Brian McHale (who
believes that postmodernism involves the replacement
of a modernist epistemological focus with an ontological focus).
In line with these critics, I consider postmodernism,
in terms of this study, to be primarily a literary genre in itself
(albeit a genre which happens to encompass and incorporate a number
of other literary genres), though one informed, logically, by a
numerous other social and cultural forces. In the most general
sense, postmodern literary works tend to mix different
literary genres (as evident in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges,
Paul Auster and Alan Moore) and various levels of culture and style
(as evident in the novels of Thomas Pynchon and David Markson)
as well as the serious with the playful (as we see in the plays
and stories of Samuel Beckett). If postmodern fiction
can be fairly said to have any particular artistic imperative or
purpose, it is to undermine the foundations of our notions of experience
in order to reveal the utter pointlessness of existence. In that
respect, postmodernism in art and literature parallels
the post-structural movement in cultural theory, which itself subverts
the foundations of language and demonstrates that the meaning of
language dissipates into a complex play of interdeterminacies.

References

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image-Music-Text.
Trans. Stephen Heath. New York, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

All content is (c) ImageTexT 2004 - 2018 unless otherwise noted. All authors
and artists retain copyright unless otherwise noted.
All images are used with permission or are permissible under fair use. Please
see our legal
notice.